GUIDANCE ON STUDYING

STOP , LOOK AND LISTEN - IT SHOULD BE WORTH YOUR WHILE

For many students, university is a continuation of school. Nowadays, in Scotland at
least, most of the class you were at school with over the last couple of years
have probably gone to university, though not all to the same one. "I did
pretty well at school, so I'm going to do pretty well at university, too".
Right? No, wrong. Well, you might do pretty well but not by carrying on the
same learning techniques most people use at school. In fact so many people have
crashed out in first-year courses at university that I've been motivated to
offer this page of study guidelines to physics students and anyone else who
cares to read it. The guidelines aren't official policy, just personal advice
based on the experience of your successful predecessors.

Books have been written on how to study. Some of them are in the library and a
couple are referenced at the end. This page isn't a book, just a list of hints.
Don't be too proud or know-it-all to read it. Maybe you do know it all, in
which case you'll be looking forward to sailing into Honours with the minimum
of effort. A good many students who don't score well spend just as much time on
their studies as those who do score well. They just spend the time
ineffectively, making life difficult for themselves. Before I get to the
details, let me begin with an overview.

What are the really important differences between school and university? Here
are some.

1) Independence
and personal responsibility. You have to earn your degree. It's not going
to be spoon fed to you. Yes, you'll be given notes, text-book references and so
on but no-one is going to nag you into learning every week, no-one is going to
organise your life for you; precious few people are going to tell you what you
should do with lectures and lecture notes, what you do when you read books and
articles. You're supposed to figure out for yourself how the system works. Too
many people don't succeed, it seems to me. Realising very early on in your
degree that you are in charge, that, by and large, you will reap as you sow, is
a huge step forward.

2) Information in university comes in bigger chunks than at school.
Individual lectures cover much more than a school lesson of comparable time. A
single 24-lecture course can well cover a significant amount of a textbook and
a lot of peripheral material too. If you start university by taking subjects
you've covered before at school, the novelty of the material doesn't show up. A
lecture is a condensation by the lecturer of a considerable amount of material
and thought. If you miss a lecture, it will take you much longer than an hour
to read up all that the lecturer has put into the lecture. A lot of people
haven't worked this out. Another lesson people learn too late is that you can
make up a large amount of lost ground on a school course in just a few days
before the exam but you can't, unless you're exceptionally talented, make up
enough on any university course you've let slip. There's too much of it. If
you're talented enough to pull off the last minute revision trick, you're
probably also clever enough to work out that missing lectures in the first
place isn't a smart move.

3) The difficulty of the material at university is much greater than at
school. This isn't so obvious in first year, where most topics dealt with
are intelligible when you hear them, or should be. If they're not, it doesn't
usually take much questioning at tutorial, asking the lecturer or talking it
over with class-mates to sort out a difficulty. In later years, though, you'll
have to work hard to understand some topics, or read and reflect extensively to
weigh up opposing arguments and come to well-founded conclusions.

4) The level of understanding and competence required is far higher at
university. At school, you could often get off with having just a vague
idea of what something was about. At university, you are expected to be master
of your subject. You don't get marks in an exam for waffle, or certainly not in
physics exams. You get marks for knowing, and for doing correctly. Realising
the level of knowledge expected early on in your student career should put you
straight into the successful stream, so long as you follow up!

So much for the overview. What of the detail?

GET YOURSELF ORGANISED

Ditch dithering. I borrowed this phrase from somewhere but it hits the spot.
You need a plan. You need to fit in a social life, study and, perhaps,
sport and a part-time job. You need to divide the day into sizeable chunks of
time, like morning, afternoon and evening, when you know what you'll be doing.
You need a flexible plan, because in my experience any rigid plan is bound to
fail. Your plan shouldn't be too specific in the first instance and it must
have built-in slack, so you can daydream a bit or take a break and have the
space to make up for lost-time later. However, don't have such a loose plan
that you're just winging it most of the time. Time management is today's
jargon for a plan. Employ time management from the beginning of your student
career. You'll certainly need good time management skills by the time you're in
Honours. If you're trying to fit in a part-time job as well as study, time
management is essential. You should choose the pattern of working that suits
your personal style of learning. Do you know what that is?

It's most important to finish the tasks you've set yourself. When you're
putting some flesh onto a week's plan, set tasks that are achievable.
Don't just say 'physics revision' on the plan but be specific, e.g. 'understand
uniform circular motion and answer homework questions on this topic' or 'read
course textbook section relevant to last Thu/Fri lectures and make notes'. Also
very important is to include some active component in each task. This could be
as little as highlighting key words in photocopy notes you have, or making
notes of a textbook section you've read, making a summary of a major section of
a course or, perhaps, 'just' something you've been asked to do, such as a lab report
or tutorial examples. Being active while you learn is a well-established highly
effective aid to understanding and remembering. Look around the library the
next time you're there. You'll see some students reading with pen in hand,
making notes as they go; others playing with their mobile phone, frequently
looking up from the book in front of them at nothing in particular or out of
the window if there's one in view. Who are you going to put your money on to
score well in the next exam?

Don't forget the obvious points of being organised. Equip yourself with
a suitable place to study. This may take some trial and error. Sort yourself
out early in the academic year. Equip yourself with the tools of the student
trade, such as folders, notebooks, pens, highlighters, memory 'pen',
calculator, rubber and 'white ink', ruler and other drawing tools if needed.
Keep course-work all together in suitable folders and wallets where you can
find it. While I'm hinting at the dire consequences that can come of losing things,
remember always to keep a rolling back-up of electronic work you prepare, be it
essay, report, poster material, CAD drawing or whatever. Our advice is to keep
the master copy on your H: drive, if you're using University facilities, and
always make a back-up copy on your own memory pen or floppy.

STUDY SKILLS

Studying involves understanding, thinking, reflecting, remembering,
analysing, composing and acquiring techniques (not in any
special order). Academic study is a craft and you as a professional student are
expected to be well skilled in it. Some are born with the inclination, just as
for any other craft, but everyone has to learn most of what skill they have.
Learning takes practice, lots of practice.

Go to lectures. Missing lectures deliberately isn't cool, just an advert
for your poor judgement. If the lectures are demonstrably bad, complain
politely through the proper channels. Have you thought how lecturers know
whether they're giving good lectures or not? Remember, though, that not every
lecture will suit your preferred style of learning and there are many different
people in most classes, with different learning styles. I think that in a good
lecture you should spend most of the time engaging your brain, not taking
notes. Make a few notes, by all means, but there ought to be either adequate
handouts, or access to notes on the web or at the least clear source material
references to let you follow-up the arguments presented and put together a set
of course notes for yourself.

As a student, you should do a lot of reading, not just to pass the time
but because you're interested in the subject. Ask questions of everything you
read. It's been said before that a textbook is a large number of arguments
between two covers. When you read, don't just let the words flow past your mind
but re-think for yourself the argument presented by the authors. In physics, at
least, don't skim what you read. Make notes for yourself as you go. Physics
deals with the real world, the real universe. The real universe is a complex
place. That complexity is never far from the surface of material covered even
in first-year courses and there's plenty of scope for thinking for yourself of
the context and the validity of ideas put across in any physics course. Doing
so will make you a better student of science.

Keep up with the course. Every year in revision classes shortly before
the exams, students are trying to sort out concepts they should have sorted out
two months beforehand. At least better then than never. However, a sure fire
way of making a course hard for yourself is to let difficulties pile up. Try
the homework examples, in time. Don't just wait for the solution sheet to be
handed to you and read it over. If you do miss a class, find out if you've
missed a hand-out too and collect a copy as soon as you can. Aim to hand in
your assignment a couple of days before the final deadline. It cuts down on
personal stress and gives you breathing space for contingencies.

When you get stuck, talk. Talk with your class-mates, engage your tutor,
ask the lecturer, ask the lab demonstrator, as I've hinted above. A very
effective way of learning is to form a self-help group with several in the
class who are willing to talk about the course material over a cup of tea or
coffee. Such groups often form naturally in smaller classes but if one doesn't
seem to be forming with you in it, go out of your way to suggest the idea to a
few others. All our physics courses have a class e-mail list associated with
them and you can communicate with the whole class through this.

You have to work at remembering. Most people find mnemonics helpful.
Make up your own. Make notes in a style suited to your personal memory. If you
like bulleted summaries, make them. If you like 'mind maps' or similar
diagrammatic aids, make them. Extract the key points of an argument and show
how the whole argument brings together a range of information to reach its
conclusion. Making notes focuses your mind on a subject, acts as a record of
progress and to some extent is an external memory that you can use to refresh
quickly your own less permanent memory. However, too much of a good thing isn't
necessarily a good thing. You can spend too much time mechanically making
notes. The activity itself can become a substitute for trying to understand
what the subject is about.

Make sure your numerical skills are up to those needed in a physics course.
You should know the purpose of writing results to an appropriate number of
significant figures. You should know the role of numerical approximations. You
should know how to present and interpret numerical data in the form of graphs,
histograms, pie-charts and similar visual aids. You should know the SI units
and their symbols for quantities encountered in the course. You should be used
to applying 'reasonableness criteria' to your own numerical answers. You should
know what the buttons on your calculator do and be careful enough using them
that making mistakes is rare.

You need to develop your maths skills so that they can be applied to
physical problems. Physics uses the logic of maths at the heart of most of its
explanations and as a basis for prediction. You can go to maths lectures, think
you understand a maths technique, even pass maths exams but not really know
what to do next when a physical argument needs some mathematical development.
This is a significant problem that several physics courses will address.
However, just realising that the problem exists and that you will have to work
on it is a big step forward.

Develop your writing skills. Writing is a craft. Writing calls for
originality, inspiration, putting across a coherent argument that people will
read until the end. Your lecturers will read your reports and essays to the end
because they have to. You should make it such that once they've started, they
will also want to. When you read someone like Charles Dickens or Robert Louis
Stevenson, the words seem to flow effortlessly from the author's pen, as
inevitably as a burn cascading down a hillside. The effortlessness is an illusion.
Good writers work hard at their craft. Making notes of physics lectures isn't
good practice for writing. A lot of physics related writing involves the
presentation of facts and the logic of explanation. The quality of explanation
certainly improves with practice. Over the four years of an Honours degree,
there will be various written exercises, as well as exam questions requiring
descriptive answers. Don't forget to practice written work as well as numerical
work. Make sure you know enough grammar to avoid serious grammatical errors.
Read feedback you get on written assignments. Science student reports and
essays can be stiff and formal in style; they use circumlocutions where simple
phrases would do, they avoid using the first person when clearly the essay is
about what the writer did. Guidance on writing is given in several of our
courses.

Don't kid yourself you're working when you're not. You won't have to
look far to find students with textbooks in front of them, notes spread out,
playing Su Doku or filling in the easy crossword; students who have gone to a
computer class-room to write some more of their assignment playing on-line
poker or browsing pop web pages. I'm not talking here about 10 minute breaks
but about spending hours a day on these activities. If you've been guilty of
this you'll know that at the end of the day you think you've been sitting with
your notes beside you for many hours and are mentally in need of a break but in
reality you've probably barely done half-an-hour's useful work. Yes, we all
need time-off but don't kid yourself you're working when you're not. If you're
bored, then you probably haven't been asking the right questions, or any
questions at all. You probably haven't been discussing your courses with others
in the class. Just remind yourself what you came to University for and why
you're getting yourself deeper in debt and sacrificing years of your life
without a decent income. It's really sad to see students with ability fritter
away their opportunities. You'll probably see some of your friends doing just
this.

A degree programme should be built around what educationalists call
'progression', namely a progressive expansion in the breadth and depth of your
skills and knowledge over the four years of your degree. The improvement of
your skills in writing reports, essays and articles, in speaking to small and
large groups, in making scientific posters doesn't come automatically by simple
repetition of these tasks. Neither is it magically absorbed from academics. You
yourself have to work consciously at improvement. Listen to the feedback
you get from assignments but be your own strongest critic, so that next time
you'll deliver something that bit better and, by being better focused, perhaps
do so in less time. There is an old adage that the best education is the one
you give yourself. There's some truth in this, too.

The largest part of the assessment for most degrees is the requirement to
perform at a set time, either in a written exam or in giving a presentation. If
you're only going to remember one piece of advice, remember this: preparation,
preparation, preparation.

If you follow all the advice above, you’ll implicitly bring to your
degree the essential characteristic of perseverance.
Thomas Edison, one of the world’s
most successful inventors, was well acquainted with the value of perseverance
and commented on one occasion “many
of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to
success when they gave up”.

This 'page', actually at least four pages of A4 when printed out, has gone on
long enough for the moment. Follow the advice above and you may surprise
yourself how well you get on. Every topic above is worth more than I've given
it. See the references below for further treatment and you'll notice that I've
used some of their expressions in the hints above. See also some of our
guidance on passing
exams, writing
lab reports, giving
talks, preparing
posters and writing
popular articles. Remember, you're in charge of your own degree.